The Quest for Blue (2021)

aramcoworld.com

14 points·andsoitis··9 comments

There's a whole book by great Science (journal) science writer Kai Kupferschmidt about the color blue: https://www.amazon.com/Blue-Search-Natures-Rarest-Color/dp/1...

" Even the feathers of birds, from blue jays to bluebirds, are not truly blue but the result of a biologically sophisticated trick of the eye"

This is meaningless nonsense. If the light reflected or refracted by them is blue, then they are, indeed, blue.

It's badly described, but it's a reference to structural color. Engine oil isn't rainbow-colored, but it can produce rainbow reflections due to thin-film interference. Likewise, some animals have features that appear blue, but wouldn't yield a blue pigment because the color is the result of a particular microstructure.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Structural_coloration

The author is ironically called "Tom Verde". Verde meaning green in Italian, Spanish, Portuguese and a few more languages.

And where we get the word "verdant"

> verdant: (of countryside) green with grass or other rich vegetation. > "verdant valleys" > "a deep, verdant green" Learned a new word! I wonder, however, if this word is ever used outside of SATs.

I always thought it was funny that Andrej Karpathy developed software for self driving cars - literally software for car paths.

Also I hear that the Carpathian Mountains have roadways. You're welcome :)

In some languages (such as Vietnamese XANH) blue and green use the same word. I always wondered if it was because blue was so rare (other than the sky), why make a new word a color you never see?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue%E2%80%93green_distinction...

Verde is not one of them though.

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